Young Canadians dumping home phones, survey says

TORONTO (Reuters)- More than a third of younger Canadian households are cutting the wires and relying solely on cell phones, according to a survey.

By contrast, only 4.5 percent of other households have dumped their landlines at home and use cell phones exclusively, Statistics Canada found in the survey (here).

In 2008, 8 percent of all households reported having cell phones and no landlines, up from 6.4 percent in 2007. That number jumped to 34 percent for households comprised solely of adults aged between 18 and 34.

An even greater proportion of U.S. households depend on their cell phones, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, with more than one in five of them using mobile phones only in 2008.

The Statistics Canada survey also found that two-thirds of households that used only cell phones were renters rather than homeowners.

Nearly three-quarters of Canadian households said they had a cell phone in 2008, with the highest proportion of cell phones in Alberta at 85 percent and the lowest in Quebec at 65 percent.

Less than 1 percent of Canadian households have no phone service, unchanged from 2007.